Stepping over the bodies of dead and wounded, Keller looks for the stairs. Adán wouldn’t be on the ground floor or on the top. He’d be on the second, in the back, with the possibility of getting out a window.

If he’s even here, Keller thinks. This was an ambush—a booby-trapped ambush—and they were ready for us.

But the voice track said he was here. Was here, anyway, Keller thinks as he finds the stairs and starts up, pistol pointed in front of him.

Then he trips over Aguilar’s legs.

The lawyer sits on the landing, his back against the wall, his legs stuck straight out, his left hand grasping his right arm, the glassy look of the wounded in his eyes.

He sees Keller.

“You’re supposed to be in the car,” Aguilar says softly.

Keller crouches beside him. The wound is jagged—shrapnel, not a bullet. Keller rips Aguilar’s sleeve and uses it as a tourniquet. “The medics are on the way. You won’t bleed out.”

“Go back to the car.”

Keller continues up the stairs.

A grenade clatters down the steps.

Before he can move, it goes off by his ankles. The smoke explodes up, choking him, blinding him. Staggering up the stairs, he hears gunfire above him, as the AFI troopers fight their way down from the roof. A sicario appears through the smoke in front of him. He looks confused when he sees Keller, then throws his AK up to his shoulder.

Keller fires twice into his chest and the man goes down.

Pushing past him, Keller makes it to the top of the stairs. He opens the first door he can find and sees—

Adán—

—standing by the bed—

—a pistol in his right hand.

“Don’t,” Keller says.

Hoping he does.

Barrera raises the gun.

Keller fires.

The first bullet takes off the bottom of Barrera’s jaw.

The second goes through his left eye.

Blood sprays against the wall.

The woman screams.

Keller lowers his gun.

—

Vera walks up behind him.

Together, they look down at the corpse.

The black hair, the slightly pug nose, the brown eyes.

Well, one brown eye.

“Congratulations,” Vera says.

“It’s not him,” Keller says.

“What?!”

“It’s not fucking him.”

Adán used lookalikes before, at least three of them during his war with Palma, and when Keller sees the body up close, remote from the chaos, adrenaline, darkness, and smoke, he realizes that it wasn’t Adán and that the whole raid has been a setup.

Keller, Vera, and the AFI troopers tear through the house, and in one of the bedrooms they find it.

The bathtub has been torn up and there it is—the entrance to a tunnel.

Keller jumps down.

Pistol in front of him, he moves down the tunnel, which is wired for electricity and has lights. He hopes that Barrera is in here, cowering somewhere, but the greater likelihood is that if Barrera’s down here, he has an army of sicarios protecting him.

Keller keeps pushing anyway.

Vera is right behind him, his gun also drawn.

They walk under the street and then come to the end of the tunnel and another metal ladder. Keller climbs up and pushes open the trapdoor into another house.

It’s empty.

Barrera is gone.

—

They do the press conference that afternoon. Aguilar questioned the wisdom of making a public show of what had been a desperate shootout near the nation’s capital, but Vera insisted.

“We must not only combat the cartels,” Vera said, “we must be seen to be combating the cartels. That’s the only way to restore the public’s confidence in their law enforcement agencies.”

Keller watches on television at the embassy as Vera describes the daring raid, the intense firefight, and memorializes the brave men who gave their lives. He goes on to praise the diligent work of SEIDO, and introduces Luis Aguilar, “who, as you can see, shed his blood in the pursuit of this criminal.”

Aguilar mumbles through a typed statement. “We regret our failure in this instance. However, we assure the public that the battle will go on and we must…”

Vera throws his arm around his colleague’s shoulder.

“We’re Batman and Robin.” He looks straight into the cameras. “And he’s right—the battle is just beginning. We won’t relent in our hunt for Barrera, but now I’m talking to the rest of you narcos out there. We’re coming after you. We’ll be in Tijuana next.”

“What about the beauty queen?” a reporter asks. “What about Miss Culiacán?”

Vera steps back in. “She wasn’t in the house. But don’t worry—we’ll find her and give her a new sash.”

The reporters laugh.

—

The fight starts the next day.

“You’re going home,” Aguilar tells Keller.

“Absolutely,” Keller answers. “The moment Barrera is back behind bars or on a slab.”

“Now,” Aguilar insists. “It’s too dangerous—not only for you but for other people. The booby-trapped door could have been meant for you. Other men paid with their lives.”

“That’s what soldiers do,” Vera says.

“They were policemen, not soldiers,” Aguilar says. “And this is a law enforcement action, not a war.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Vera answers.

“I object to the militarization of—”

“Tell that to the narcos,” Vera says. “If Keller is willing to stay until the job is done, I’m willing to have him. If he’s willing to stay.”

Keller’s willing.

Adán Barrera is still out there, in his world.

La Tuna, Sinaloa

Adán walks out onto the little balcony off the master bedroom of his finca.

The ranch was his aunt’s, abandoned back in the ’70s when the American DEA came in and devastated the poppy fields with fire and poison. Thousands of campesinos and gomeros—now refugees—fled their mountain homes.

Tía Delores’s finca stood empty for years, a home for only ravens.

Since his return to Mexico, Adán has poured millions into renovating the main house and the outbuildings, and more millions turning the ranch into a fortress with high walls, guard towers, sound and motion sensors, and casitas that serve as living spaces for the servants and barracks for the sicarios.

For Adán it is a return to innocence, of sorts, to the idyllic day of his teenage years when he would come up here to escape the heat of the Tijuana summer and dive into the cold waters of the granite quarries. Of family dinners at large tables under the oak trees, listening to the campesino men play tamboras and guitars, and the old women, the abuelas, tell stories from a time beyond his memory.

A good life, a rich life, a life that the North Americans destroyed.

It is good to be home, Adán thinks.

Despite Sondra’s stupidity.

Stupid, vapid Sondra was a perfect pawn for both white and black. As it turned out, it wasn’t a problem. He and Magda went to the safe house in Atizapán, he let himself be seen and heard, and then he slipped out of the net that had been thrown around the house.

The lookalike was already there, a happy idiot thrilled to have a nice house and a beautiful woman for a few days, an expensive whore who resembled Magda in all the most superficial ways.

Adán will take care of the lookalike’s family.

The only downside is that Keller didn’t die in the ambush. It would have been perfect—the North American killed in a botched raid that couldn’t have been blamed on me. But Keller is still out there, alive, and Magda is still urging that he be left out there. Too much at stake now, Magda says, too much happening to take another chance.

Adán maintains the “stay of execution” but insists that it’s just that. Unlike the United States, Mexico has no death penalty, but Adán likes to think of Keller just inhabiting a mobile cell on death row.

After the raid, Adán deemed it safe to move to the ranch in Sinaloa, outside La Tuna, high in the Sierra Madre. His convoy made its way up winding roads—dusty now but often impassable with mud in the rainy season—through tiny hamlets made of spare odds and ends of wood and corrugated tin.